Angry Birds peace conference

As a hopeless addict of the addictive iPhone game, I am just happy to see those pigs GET WHAT THEY DESERVED.

Yep.

Meme of Tomorrow: Sequins

This guy loves his sequins....expect a ton o' remixes from visionary to awful in the next week.

Image from Gawker as I'm too lazy to screenshot my own. Deal with it.

I Am Spartacus: Twitter stands up

This issue will only be know to UK types, but relevant for all.

In May of this year, Paul Chambers tweeted the following

"Crap! Robin Hood Airport is closed. You've got a week... otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!"

 

Tasteful? No. Criminal? Debatable.

Unfortunately for Paul, Doncaster's Robin Hood Airport did not find this so funny and he was subsequently prosecuted under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 for sending a 'menacing' tweet.

Unsurprisingly, Twitterers weren't happy with this perceived slight on their free speech and Paul (and later his lawyer David Allen Green) saw an uplift in both support and followers.

Paul has appealed against his conviction and fine and yesterday (Nov 11th) he had his day in court. I had mixed feelings about this. It was certainly a stupid act from Paul, especially in the current climate, but did it really merit a court case? Really?

Paul lost his appeal, which as well as seriously upsetting his life sets a rather dangerous precedent for the future. 

Look at your backlog of tweets. Do any of them appear 'indecent, menacing or obscene'? Ever vented with possibly unnecessary rage over a brand or service? Everyone has the right to question comments they feel to be ignorant, hateful or dangerous. But surely, everyone(at least individuals) has the right to say those comments too?

 

Twitter, always the home for digital grassroots activism, didn't take the verdict lying down. Users began to reproduce Paul's tweet, with the hashtag  #iamspartacus.

 

At the beginning of writing this post, I clicked on the hashtag. Give or take a few minutes checking out how to become a fast food wonder on Asylum I've probably spent 20 minutes writing this.

 

This is the current state of the hashtag, and it's still going.

Twitter can indeed be a force for the good.

Mem Of The Day: Inception Animals

We've had the Inception noise button

We've had the Inception Cat


Now, for your viewing delight, various animal video memes get dramatic to Inception. Braaaaaaaaaahm

 Inception Cat will haunt your dreams.

Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert & The Internet: A Love/Hate Story

It started off so well.

Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's Rally To Restore Sanity this week was designed to bring a little balance to the fraught political landscape seemingly owned by the carping tea-partiers. (Yes, I'm left-wing. Shoot me)

The two Daily Show stars have generally had a big internet following. From the early days of the huge Facebook groups supporting Colbert's fictitious presidential campaign to the massive surge of support when the first rumours of a Stewart/Colbert rally surfaced, these two were made for internet stardom. Both intelligent and sufficiently anti-establishment to earn them the support of laptop warriors, there was always a big chance that the internet was going to come out to play at the rally.

There's been some great coverage on the many imaginative signs waved around at the rally, so I thought I'd pick out a few of my net-themed favourites. Cheers to BuzzFeed for being a constant source of procrastinating, timewasting entertainment.

Youtube Stars

Jonathan the zombie strikes again! 

Bratty white trash kids who loves his bacon.
 

Religious Parody

Fed up of established religion? try The Church Of The Flying Spaghetti Monster.

General Geekiness

I'm not geeky enough to get the entire joke, but I'm sure there's some PHP developers in Leeds who are ROFLing right now.

Hey Reddit bot!

Internet Trolls

Christ, stop shouting!

 And again...

Viral/Guerilla Marketing
Okay, not strictly the internet. Who are you, the Accuracy Police?

Aqua Teen Hunger Force's audacious marketing campaign got the Boston police a bit hot and bothered.


Image Memes

Oh Keanu,  not again :(

End of unnecessarily long image list

Did you see a couple of little Reddit bots amongst the signs? There's a reason for that. In September, Reddit held a huge donations drive to give money to charity and to convince people that Colbert could hold a rally to challenge Glenn Beck's much maligned Restoring Honor event.

During a post event press conference, Stewart and Colbert were asked about the involvement of the internet in the rally. Did they mention Reddit? Yep. Did they credit the site with the creation of the rally idea? Nope.

Drew Curtis from Fark has already weighed in on the debate with an impassioned blog post, accusing the Daily show stars of lifting material from Reddit & Fark and demanding an apology for the slight on Reddit's efforts towards the rally.

This may not end well....

Saucepan Cake - It will change your life.

If you're like me (I feel for you if you are) you'll have the occasional unstoppable craving for something decent and sweet. I'm not talking cheap chocolate bars, shitty sherbert or god forbid CEREAL BARS, you dirty hippy.

I'm talking the holy grail for the terminally sweet-toothed: CAKE.

For uber lazy cake lovers cake in a mug is the snack du jour. It's quick, takes only a few household ingredients and comes out looking and tasting vaguely edible. And for a dessert created in under 5 minutes, you can't really do any better.

Or can you?

When I'm bored, I start messing around in the kitchen. Results aren't always suitable for human consumption (cooked glace cherries? hell on earth) but I struck gold with this little experiment.
It takes all the ingredients of the cake in a mug experience and elevates them into something far superior.

Saucepan Cake

Ingredients:
1 egg
3 tbsp sugar
3 tbsp flour
2 tbsp cocoa
3 tbsp oil (olive/vegetable, it doesn't matter)
3 tbsp water
Any other flavourings/additions, cinnamon being a nice touch.

Recipe:
1. Mix all ingredients thoroughly in a saucepan

2. Put saucepan on the hob on a medium heat
3. Stir mixture constantly whilst it begins to cook
4. When cake is at required level of gloopiness/cakeitude, tip onto plate/bowl
5. Devour, ignoring feelings of self-disgust and shame at choosing this over a fresh fruit salad.

The experience is pretty much like a chocolate fondant, except made in 3 minutes and without the need to present it on a dish with raspberry coulis.

As the wonderful Gregg Wallace says: 'The road to Masterchef is littered with ruined chocolate fondants' so ditch the ponceiness, cook it in a saucepan and enjoy.

"Faaaaaantastic"

 

Meme of the day: Average Cats

Tired of lolcats? I can't see how you possibly could be, but I accept there must be meme-burnout now and again.

Well, as an antidote to cutesy sentiments, questionable spelling and the Impact font, try Average Cats

and my favourite:

The first post is the deepest, baybeee..... Youtube censorship and Happy Keanu

Well they (who's they? The opinionated scoundrels) say that you should start as you mean to go on, so this first, momentous, blogpost will be a mixture of my genuine love for all things online and my genuine love for memes, mainly involving cats.

Firstly, Turkey's lift of their ban on Youtube  Turkey originally blocked the video sharing site back in 2008 when offensive videos about Turkey's founding fathers popped up. Now these videos have disappeared, Turkey wants to play again. A promising sign of governments starting to relax their draconian hold on the internet? Or is this a token "Hey, we love free speech!" gesture to the people of Turkey, whilst wagging a warning finger at Youtube to not post such inflammatory content again? Youtube for their part insist they did not delete the videos. Are Youtube going to play nice in future?

Secondly, my greatest love (after focaccia and Johnny Depp) is memes. Musical ones, topical ones, image macros, video responses, I love 'em all.

After a long time in the doldrums Keanu is finally happy again.And the many varied denizens of the imageboards of the t'internet are happy to Photoshop him into various situations. All in the best possible taste of course.